Laurie Cassie:
Job: Grade 6/7 teacher part time and has been the SMART Board mentor for the Vancouver School Board from 2008. Laurie has presented at over 50 Pro-D days around the province. She often speaks about how to make interactive SMART Board lessons, student presentations, using video in the classroom and features the Vancouver SMART Board team include in digital units.
School: David Livingstone Elementary, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Livingstone is a District Technology Inquiry school which means that the staff is interested in using technology such as, SMART Boards, video, digital cameras, blogs, document cameras and the SMART Response system to support our teaching and our students learning. It is very important to the staff that our school is well rounded and we are also know for 3-4 day field trips in the intermediate grades, hands-on learning and our arts program.
Discovery Education:
Livingstone was originally part of a pilot project in Vancouver to try Discovery Education. These videos became an integral part of our lessons and the teachers advocated for a school license. Laurie has hosted a workshop in Vancouver run by Discovery staff and is very excited about some of the features including building a class list for student to access video assignments at home.
Laurie uses Discovery Education extensively in her language arts program and social studies. Livingstone has a uniquely collaborative staff and at the grade 6/7 level the teachers co-plan and teach the language arts skills through sophisticated topics. For example, we have taught the First World War, Second World War, 6 major world religions, Industrial Revolution, civil rights (a historical perspective), slavery, modern day child labour and the Middle Ages over the past 4 years. Laurie is passionate about using video to bring these topics to life. She has completed a classroom based action research, within our SMART Board Inquiry group, that indicated a multimodal teaching approach, of which video is a key component, helps our students retain the content much better. Our staff has developed a guided viewing approach of which Discovery Education is invaluable as small 5-10 minutes sections of video are ideal. We are able to show a clip that illustrates the exact topic that we were studying that day. Laurie’s passion for video in teaching extends to feature length films and she awakens a passion of historical events, classic movie genres and character in our students. In 2010 – 2011, she will be participating in a self directed professional development inquiry with the grade 6/7 team to further look at how video can support our students.
Free Time: What is that? Laurie is one of those passionate teachers whose dedication to her students is an inspiration to the teachers who work with her. In her free time, Laurie enjoys travel, rug hooking and reading.